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<Paper uid="P95-1010">
  <Title>Features and Agreement</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="72" end_page="73" type="evalu">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Consistency and agreement
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Complex feature structure analyses of agreement require that certain combinations of feature constraints are inconsistent in order to correctly reflect agreement failure. For example, the agreement failure in him runs is reflected in the inconsistency of the constraints (case) = acc and (case) = nora. In the LCG account presented above, the agreement failure in him runs is reflected by the failure of acc to imply nora, not by the inconsistency of the features acc and nora. Thus in LCG there is no principled reason not to assign a category an apparently contradictory feature specification such as np^nom^acc (this might be a reasonable lexical category assignment for an NP such as Kim).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  sis of (5c).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Consider the German examples in (5), cited by Pullum and Zwicky (1986) and Ingria (1990). These examples show that while the conjunction finder und hilft cannot take either a purely accusative (5a) or dative complement (5b), it can combine with the NP Frauen (5c), which can appear in both accusative and dative contexts.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  (5) a. * Er findet und hilft Miinner he find-ACC and help-DAT men-ACC b. * Er findet und hilft Kindern he find-ACC and help-DAT children-DAT c. Er findet und hilft he find-ACC and help-DAT</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Contrary to the claim by Ingria (1990), these examples can be accounted for straight-forwardly using the standard feature subsumption-based account of coordination. Now, this account presupposes the existence of appropriate underspecified categories (e.g., in the English example above it was crucial that major category labels were decomposed into the features noun and verb). Similarly, we decompose the four nominal cases in German into the 'subcase' features obj (abbreviating 'objective') and dir (for 'direct') as follows.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> By assigning the NPs Mh'nner and Kindern the fully specified case features shown above, and Frauen the underspecified case feature (obj) = +, both the feature structure generalization and subsumption accounts of coordination fail to generate the ungrammatical (5a) and (hb), and correctly accept (5c), as shown in Figure 6.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8">  remained \[ap\] 1 .p vp/npvap npvap/e wealthy a Republican grew and vp ap and np vp/ap conj vp/ap /il npvap P conj npvap &amp;quot;P vp/ap eo npvap eo  As in the previous example, the LCG approach does not require the case feature to be decomposed. However, as shown in Figure 7 it does assign the conjunction finder und hilfl to the category vp/np^ace^dat; hence the analysis requires that Frauen be assigned to the 'inconsistent' category np^accAdat. Such overspecified or 'inconsistent' features may seem ad hoc and unmotivated, but they arise naturally in the formal framework of Morrill's extended LCG.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> In fact, they seem to be necessary to obtain a linguistically correct description of coordination in German. Consider the ungrammatical 'double coordination' example in (6). Both the feature structure  generalization and subsumption accounts incorrectly predict it to be well-formed, as shown in Figure 8. (6) * Er findet und hilft M~nner und he find-ACC and help-DAT men-ACC and</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="73" end_page="73" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Kindern
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> children-DAT However, the LCG analysis systematically distinguishes between Frauen, which is assigned to the category npAaccAdat, and Mdnner und Kindern, which is assigned to the weaker category np^(accvdat). Thus the LCG analysis correctly predicts (6) to be ungrammatical, as shown in Figure 9. The distinction between the categories npAacc^dat and np^(accvdat), and hence the existence of the apparently inconsistent categories, seems to be crucial to the ability to distinguish between the grammatical (5c) and the ungrammatical (6).</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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